From stephe%speaker@mail.uunet.ca Wed Aug 2 10:07:47 1995 Received: from seraph.uunet.ca (uunet.ca) by dkuug.dk with SMTP id AA21114 (5.65c8/IDA-1.4.4j for ); Wed, 2 Aug 1995 21:18:20 +0200 Received: from speaker by mail.uunet.ca with UUCP id <174755-4>; Wed, 2 Aug 1995 15:19:50 -0400 Received: by speaker (MKS UUCP); Wed, 02 Aug 95 14:07:47 EDT To: SC22WG15@dkuug.dk Subject: US WG15 TAG response to WG15 AI 9505-25 Message-Id: <807368867@speaker> Date: Wed, 2 Aug 1995 14:07:47 -0400 From: stephe@srw.com (Stephen Walli) X-Charset: ASCII X-Char-Esc: 29 Ladies and Gentlemen, The following document will appear as an attachment to the U.S. Action Item Report. It is being made available early here as a courtesy. best regards, stephe ------ WG15 TAG N535 To: SC22/WG15 July 12, 1995 From: USA Subject: AI 9505-25 US WG15 TAG Response to WG15 Action 9505-25 Reference Document: WG15 N561 WG15 N561 suggests that additional utilities be included under the current revision work in the areas of compression, visual editors, and file version control, and that these utilities possibly be drawn from other operating system environments. These areas are out of scope for the current revision project, which is already very far along the IEEE balloting process, and there are no current projects approved to add any of the specific utilities suggested. A number of observations are in order when considering these items for possible future revisions: - The standard's rationale (Annex E) discusses specific reasons for certain decisions with respect to certain traditional UNIX utilities in these functional areas and their inclusion or lack of inclusion. (p. 859:compress, 860:emacs, 862:SCCS) - The standard's rationale discusses the scope, motivation, and historical implementation background for why the standard is the way it is, and the basis for which utilities have been standardized. (E.1.1 - E.1.1.5) - The amount of work to accurately and adequately describe these suggested utilities, such that they can be implemented from the specification, is considerable. Certain utilities come from environments outside the expertise of the current projects. - Interfaces from other environments may not integrate in a coherent way into the currently specified utility set. - A number of the example utilities suggested in WG15 N561 have copyright, patent, or other intellectual property issues surrounding them. The final suggestion in WG15 N561, with respect to identifying a specific directory for the standard utilities, is an implementation detail, and inappropriate for the standard. The effect desired can easily be accomplished however, by using getconf. (Please see E.4.12). Page 1 of 1